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During anAi??appearanceAi??on Fox News, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) was asked about raising the Medicare eligibility age to 67. She strongly rebuked the idea, saying that beneficiaries aren’t going to “evaporate from the face of the earth for two years”:

PELOSI: Those people are not going to evaporate from the face of the earth for two years, they’re going to have medical needs and they’re going to be attended to. And the earlier the intervention for it, the less the cost will be and the better the quality of life. I do think we should subject every federal dollar that is spent to the harshest scrutiny. I do think the challenge in Medicare is not Medicare it’s health care costs in general. […] There is money to be saved there, I don’t think it has to come out of benefits or beneficiaries, and I don’t think you have to raise the age.

Watch it:

Recall that raising the Medicare age to 67 wouldAi??pass on costs to seniors of $11.4 billionAi??every year.

Click hereAi??to pledge to hold any Democrat who agrees to a deal that cuts Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid benefits accountable.

After the tragedy at Sandy Hook, special interest lobbyists for the NRA and the gun industry are actually trying to expand the number of guns out on the streets. In Arkansas, they actually succeeded in lifting the ban on guns in church.

But in other communities, citizens are fighting the NRA and winning. In Wyoming, the House passed an NRA-backed bill to allow guns on college campuses.

But educators, led by University of Wyoming PresidentAi??Tom Buchanan, got involved. “Our colleges and universities have to be safe and secure sanctuaries for learning,” he told the press, rallying educators to testify against the bill and petition their lawmakers. “Weapons on campus or in the classroom would have a chilling and unacceptable impact on education.”

Following the educator outrage, the Senate Education Committee chose to take no action on the bill, effectively killing it.

Click here to sign onto our petition supporting the White Houseai??i??s bold gun plan.

Gov. John Kasich (R-OH)

Ohio’s Republican governor John Kasich (R-OH) has proposed a new tax plan that would radically restructure taxes in the state.

The plan would cut income taxes for most Ohioans, but increase extend sales taxes to additional goods — which tend to fall on poor and working people. The result is, as Policy Matters Ohio and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found, that the rich would get a huge tax cut while the poorest Ohioans would actually face a tax increase. Here’s a table from their report demonstrating this:

As you can see, the poorest 20% would have their taxes raised by $63Ai??annually. Ai??The top one percent would get a more than $10,000 tax increase.

CPC co-chair Keith Ellison

Congress is locked in budget negotiations related to the upcoming sequester. This week, the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) unveiled the “Balancing Act.” Noting that 2/3 of the deficit reduction that has taken place since 2011 has come from cuts, not revenues, the CPC plan adopts an approach that would have a truly balanced 50-50 cuts-revenue ratio.

Additionally, the plan invests in the economy with the goal of creating jobs — the best long-term path to deficit reduction.

Here’s some of the key elements of the CPC plan:

Raise $948 Billion In Revenues: This is done by closing various special interest loopholes — such as international tax loopholes that maintain offshore tax havens — and by ending subsidies for fossil fuel companies.
Cutting $278 Billion In Pentagon Waste: Unlike some lawmakers in Washington who want to spare the Defense Department altogether, the CPC cuts backs onAi??unnecessary weapons programs such as the V-22 Osprey. It also replaces the F-35 with the F-18 and reduces nuclear weapons expenditures, among other measures.
Cuts The Deficit By Investing $276 Billion In Jobs: The plan also invests money by extending the Make Work Pay tax credit for a year and by spending on teachers and school modernization as well as transportation infrastructure.

Here’s a chart showing how the Balancing Act would finally offer a balanced approach to deficit reduction after years of relying on cuts:

One area the Balancing Act does not cut is Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security benefits.

Click hereAi??to pledge to hold any Democrat who agrees to a deal that cuts Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid benefits accountable.

Is church really the place for your firearm?

On Monday, the Arkansas legislature, rather than enacting common sense gun reforms, decided to legalize guns in churches by passing a bill to do so. Democratic Governor Mike Beebe is expected shortly to sign the bill.

Protesting this new law, Rev. Scott Walters, pastor of Christ Episcopal Church in downtown Little Rock, wrote to his local paper:

The legislature’s action has already impacted our ministry at Christ Church. It’s given us one more hurdle, one more fear to deal with as we try to do our Christian duty and welcome a stranger into our midst as if he or she were Christ himself. Its impact is not hypothetical. It is real. Loving our neighbor just got a little harder.

Click here to sign onto our petition supporting the White Houseai??i??s bold gun plan and to donate to help run the ad in Kentucky.

Call on New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn to bring a paid sick days bill to a vote.

Emilio Palaguachi was an employee at a New York City until very recently. He worked 60 hours a week, but his workplace had no sick leave policy. So when he fell ill with the flu, Palaguachi he got the permission of his manager to take the day off to see a doctor. Yet he was still fired.

ai???They didnai??i??t give me any explanation,ai??? Palaguachi was quoted telling a local paper through a translator. ai???I asked if I had done something wrong and nobody knew what to say. Actually, everyone [co-workers] was upset because of how I was fired.ai???

The United States is one of the few countries that does not guarantee paid sick days to its employees. In New York City, progressives, with the help of Palaguachi,Ai??are campaigning to change this within their own community.

Join with PCCC to ask New York City Council Speaker Speaker Christine Quinn to hold a vote on a city-wide paid sick leave.

Many Americans woke up today and were shocked by news that the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) will be ending regular mail service on Saturdays (package delivery will continue). In response to this announcement, the National Association of Letter Carriers, which represents postal employees, called on Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe to resign.

The move is supposed to save the Post Office $2 billion annually, something it claims it is being forced to do due to budget woes.

But the truth is, the Post Office’s budget wouldn’t have any problems if Congress hadn’t forced anAi??unnecessaryAi??and burdensome federal mandate onto it.

In 2006, the Congress passed theAi??Ai??Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006Ai??(PAEA). Under PAEA, USPS was forced to ai???prefund its future health care benefit payments to retirees for the next 75 years in an astonishing ten-year time spanai??? ai??i?? meaning that it had to put aside billions of dollars to pay for the health benefits of employees itAi??hasnai??i??t even hired yet, something ai???thatAi??no other government or private corporationAi??is required to do.ai???

In 2011, it was estimated that the Post Office would actually have a $1.5 billion surplus if PAEA was never enacted. Altering or repealing this poison pill legislation would allow the Postal Service to continue its services without being burdened by the 75 year pre-fund requirement. But that requires Congress to act.

Ai??UPDATE:Ai??As a historical anecdote as to how far back the conservative war on the Post Office goes, experts point out that the service delivered mail twice a day until 1950.

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY)

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is feeling the heat after the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC) released a new ad featuring a Kentucky gun owner calling him out for taking money from gun manufacturers and opposing reforms. Watch it:

In response to the ad, McConnell releasedAi??a document ignoring the actual issues at hand and instead attacking the PCCC. McConnell’s response leads with the false statement that we only have one donor from Kentucky. The money in politics watchdog Public Campaign debunks this claim in an email roundup, pointing out we actually have 2,000 times as many donors from Kentucky, but that they are small donors — the sort McConnell is unfamiliar with:

The McConnell camp fired back crowing that only one Kentuckian gave PCCC over $200, apparently forgetting that unitemized, small donors count. PCCC says 2,000 Kentuckians contributed under $200. Kentuckyai??i??s LEO Weekly reports that McConnell might have forgotten that donors at this size exist after spending the past three months criss-crossing the country for big money fundraisers from Beverly Hills and Chicago to the December 17 D.C. fundraiser for Amgen just days before McConnell negotiated the fiscal cliff deal that included a $500 million giveaway to the company. Only one percent of McConnellai??i??s contributions were under $200 in the past three months.

The LEO Weekly, a local outlet that Public Campaign cites above, took McConnell to task, pointing out that he has very few small donors himself and that more than twice as many of his itemized contributions come from out of state:

McConnellai??i??s campaign cited a federal database that only compiles donations over $200, but PCCC would subsequently point out that they actually have raised over 2,000 contributions from their 7,000 members in Kentucky, averaging less than $15 …

Sen. Goedde

One Idaho Republican lawmaker is such a fan of Ayn Rand — the radical philosopher who wrote “The Virtue of Selfishness” and who wanted to abolish every government social insurance program — that he has introduced a bill to mandate every high school student reads one of her books:

Sen. John Goedde, chairman of the Idaho Senateai??i??s Education Committee, introduced legislation Tuesday to require every Idaho high school student to read Ayn Randai??i??s ai???Atlas Shruggedai??? and pass a test on it to graduate from high school.

When Sen. Bob Nonini, R-Coeur dai??i??Alene, asked Goedde why he chose that particular book, Goedde said to laughter, ai???That book made my son a Republican.ai???

Philosopher Ayn Rand coincidentally happens to be one of of House Budget Committee chairman Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) main political idols.

A new report finds that states are actually being denied billions of due to rich individuals and large corporations using offshore tax havens.

The report by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group concludes that tax havens cost state governments $39.8 billion in lost revenues in 2011. Corporations were responsible for $26 billion of this revenue loss.

Here are the states that faced the most revenue loss:

California: $7.14 billion in lost revenue
New York: $4.27 billion in lost revenue
New Jersey: $2.8 billion in lost revenue

Since the recession began, states haveAi??laid off over 130,000 teachersAi??because they lack the funds to keep them hired. Cracking down on these tax havens would be one way to re-hire those teachers and to spend money on badly-needed infrastructure.